Sarah Darer Littman: Heck with solutions, just blame the poor

Published
6:35 pm EST, Thursday, February 16, 2012

As the debate heats up around Governor Malloy's proposed education reforms, it's been extremely dispiriting to witness white suburban prejudice on display in the editorial pages of the state's newspapers.

Perennial single-parent basher Chris Powell, managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, wrote in Jan. 21 editorial: "(Malloy) made a compelling argument for what is called early childhood education, the euphemism for compensating for the child neglect resulting from childbearing outside marriage. Because of this neglect, a quarter or so of Connecticut's children are entering school far behind kids who have actual parents."

"Actual parents?" So any child born out of wedlock has "fake" parents? When I lived in the UK, I took my son to the NHS clinic. Tired and stressed, I wept, "I'm such a bad mother." In her no-nonsense British way, the nurse said, "Well, he doesn't know any better, you're the only one he's got."

There are many forms of neglect. I live in an affluent town where kids with what Mr. Powell would call two "actual" parents have eating disorders, alcohol and drug problems, just like urban kids with single parents. The difference is their parents have insurance for treatment.

Then the Hartford Courant's Bob Englehart was suspended for a week without pay after a post in which he said: "Inner-city poor and minority-filled schools aren't going to change until we can somehow change the pervasive core of the problem: dysfunctional inner-city poor minority families. ... For the most part, losers raise losers. Somehow we've got to get to these families and teach them how to respect education."

Seriously Mr. Englehart? Do you really believe that white families have the monopoly on a respect for education? How does it benefit kids to get the message that they are "losers" being raised by "losers"?

What both of these privileged white men are missing is that poverty is the problem crippling the urban schools. But why look at the tax and budget policies that have exacerbated their difficulties when it's so much easier to blame the poor for their own misfortune?

Census data from 2009 showed the median wealth for white households was roughly 20 to 1 to that of blacks and 18 to 1 to that of Hispanics, far exceeding the 7 to 1 ratio the groups reached in 1995.

It's totally unsurprising that this massive wealth divide is reflected in test scores. A recent study released by Stanford University, published as a chapter in a research book titled, "Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances," found that the gap in test scores between the higher-income and low-income children has grown by about 40 percent and is now nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap.

"We had expected the relationship between family income and children's test scores to be pretty stable over time. It's a well-known fact that the two are related," said Sean Reardon, author of the study. "But the fact that the gap has grown substantially, especially in the last 25 years, was quite surprising, striking and troubling."

Reardon points to the fact that wealthy parents spend more on enrichment classes and tutoring. Meanwhile, over the past few decades we've cut taxes for the wealthy while whittling away the programs for the poor.

"It's harder to be poor in America than it used to be," Reardon said. "Some aspects of the social safety net have gotten weaker, and programs to help families through hard times have been dismantled."

"Trickle down economics" hasn't worked. It's created, to paraphrase the Kerner Committee, "two societies ... separate and unequal," and unless we stop blaming the poor and instead start investing in early childhood education and reversing the cuts to important literacy programs it will destroy the American Dream.